{Reposted from The Lid blog}
Alexis Grenell, who was Andrew Cuomo’s deputy director of intergovernmental affairs when he was state attorney general, wrote an op-ed in the very liberal magazine, The Nation. ripping the New York governor into shreds. Using the nickname for Cuomo fans, the article called “The Collapse of the Cuomosexual” accuses Cuomo of milking the Covid pandemic. Or as she put it, “St. Andrew of Covid, our savior of the spring, is now milking his 15 minutes of fame for an extra 30.”
Along with his quest for attention, Ms. Grenell believes that the Angry Andy of pre-pandemic days has returned:
The Andrew Cuomo New Yorkers know and mostly tolerate, the snarling attack dog who gaslights fellow Democrats and deploys staff to call his female critics ‘f—-g idiots,’ dropped down to Earth last week. It was a hard landing after a long-distance love affair with a fanbase in a galaxy far, far away.”
As an example of the Cuomo breakdown, she uses his recent press conference freakout at the reporter who dared to ask him if NY City schools were going to close.
“First of all let’s try not to be obnoxious and offensive in your tone because you’re 100 percent wrong, these laws have all been in effect for months,” referring to the state’s 3 percent threshold for closings. “I don’t know if you were here, or you were paying attention…We did it already! That’s the law! An orange zone and a red zone! Follow the facts!”
Grenell recognizes that Angry Andy was a calming voice at the height of the pandemic, but the way he freaked at reporters is his usual demeanor.
She pointed to Cuomo’s recent book lauding himself for doing a great job managing the pandemic, likening it to Winston Churchill writing about his handling of WWII during WWII.
The book is an undignified victory lap by the facts-first persona that won him legitimate praise, to begin with, underscoring the point that for Cuomo it was always more about presentation than substance.
It’s why he and his staff reflexively insult anyone who criticizes his handling of the pandemic or insists on returning to the normal system of democratic governance as Jefferson envisioned it. People like the relentlessly honest Bill Hammond from the Empire Center for Public Policy, who’s currently suing the administration to force it to disclose the real number of Covid-related nursing home deaths (“yet another publicity stunt from an arm of the far-right advocacy industrial complex”). Or Assembly member Ron Kim for suggesting that the governor acted against the public interest in letting his state be one of the two that grant hospitals and nursing homes broad corporate immunity (“politically motivated”). Or Democratic and Republican lawmakers who want to curtail the governor’s emergency powers after granting them in March, and return to their role as a co-equal branch of government (“stupid” and “completely political”).
Look at how Cuomo addressed his nursing home order, which resulted in somewhere between 11K and 15K senior citizen deaths. Cuomo blamed everyone except himself for the Nursing Home deaths. The list of Cuomo’s blame game includes the nursing home patients themselves, President Trump, healthcare workers, the feds, and the fact that old people die. Since that order, Gov Cuomo has blamed everyone except himself for the Nursing Home deaths. The list of Cuomo’s blame game includes the nursing home patients themselves, President Trump, healthcare workers, the feds, the fact that old people die, and accusations that his office was responsible for the overwhelming number of nursing home deaths in NY State were a “political charade.”
Blaming every criticism of him as Political is a common theme of Angry Andy. The day after Thanksgiving, he blasted the SCOTUS ruling protecting religious gatherings in New York State as an ‘irrelevant’ political statement.
Grenell finishes:
The whole thing was already very Through the Looking Glass before the International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences announced on Friday that they were awarding the governor an Emmy for his “television shows with characters, plot lines, and stories of success and failure.” Next, he’ll be playing himself in an Aaron Sorkin movie, taking three points off the back end. Aside from having just barely survived the delusion that elevated a reality TV character to the presidency, we’re now giving a real-life governor an entertainment award for doing his actual job. Where does that leave governors like Michigan’s Gretchen Witmer, who also gave press briefings, but didn’t take a bow—and got death threats instead?
There’s something genuinely depressing about seeing the son of a man who refused a seat on the Supreme Court so eager to be flattered by Ben Stiller. It’s almost hard to remember how he ridiculed two-time Emmy Award–winner Cynthia Nixon back in 2018 for being an unqualified celebrity.
Turns out he just wanted to trade places all along.
It turns out that Alexis Grenell, a Democratic Party consultant, has got Andrew Cuomo down to a “T.” He doesn’t act like a politician. He acts like an absolute ruler—a tyrannical one.